Algiers – “Blood”

“Blood” is a track coming from the eponymous debut of Algiers, a band who cannot be better described by anyone other than themselves. Quite literally, the biography on their soundcloud, pasted below, is something out of a great work of Southern American fiction. And so too is the video successful in conjuring the thick stew of the centuries’ densest feels, complimenting the track’s minimal space by packing in a myriad clips in a maximalist historical exposé.

“As the globalised economy churns in swells ‘neath our feet, suturing us together and tearing us apart, heads angled hellward, we bellow, Algiers!

Algiers is the danse macabre between here and nowhere, movement and stasis, order under hell, and chaos under heaven. The situation is excellent.

Algiers is a band of musicians born in Atlanta, Georgia, the rotten hub of the Ol’ American South, where W.E.B Dubois once saw a riot goin’ on, and where the hell and highwater swirls ‘round to the knees.

Holed up in our perches in London, New York and a small town in France, plague up to our necks, we conjure the dead sound to life.

The click clack of the keyboard brings us to worship. The shrieks of slaves and rebels pummeling through.

Our tongues, twisted in the service of Paul Robeson, Lee Moses, Selda Bağcan, et al, slur a call in the darkness.